


This Place is a Graveyard

by RidiculousMavis



Category: Strange Empire (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-18
Updated: 2015-12-18
Packaged: 2018-05-07 11:10:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,206
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5454482
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RidiculousMavis/pseuds/RidiculousMavis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>As it turned out, Mr Loving’s dramatic arrival and immediate departure was not to be the strangest event to befall Janestown that day. </p><p>
  <i>“The veil is thin tonight. My sleep is troubled. The dead whisper to me.”</i>
</p><p>
  <i>Rebecca felt it imperative to intervene. “The dead do not speak.”</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	This Place is a Graveyard

**Author's Note:**

  * For [within_a_dream](https://archiveofourown.org/users/within_a_dream/gifts).



> Thank you to 37cats for the betaing help!

It was Robin who first gave in to the terrors of the night and woke Rebecca over the crashing of thunder.

“It’s only a storm,” Rebecca said, bleary and wishing only to get back to sleep. But the girl had suffered much so she attempted more of a reassurance. “There have been other storms. No harm has come to you.”

“This one’s different,” Robin said.

Kelly stood at the window cooing over the flashes of lightning that cut through the sky. Rain beat against the glass and cast strange shadows into the crib, as though the fabric of the world was slipping and running away. 

Rebecca wrapped a blanket around her shoulders and went to the window too, beckoning to Robin. A peal of thunder rumbled over the landscape. 

“Aristotle believed thunder was the collision of clouds,” she told them, as close an imitation of a bedtime story as she could get. 

“Is it?” Kelly at least would be engaged. 

“Almost. The lightning causes a vacuum. It is the lightning that is the principle feature. The clouds combine hot and cold air in such a way as to produce their own electricity, discharged back to the earth.”

“Well I don’t like it,” Robin responded. “The wind in the trees… there’s something not right.”

“Ma’s out there somewhere, looking for Pa,” Kelly added, unhelpfully.

“Your mother is an experienced outdoorswoman, you do not need to fear for her,” interjected Rebecca.

“Only ghosts out there,” Robin said with discomfiting surety. “And Pa ain’t no ghost.”

Rebecca did not have the imaginative mind to see whatever it was Robin believed. She saw the objects in people, not people in other objects. “It’s natural for the mind to look for patterns, to see shapes, for comfort. But you do not need it. You are perfectly safe.”

She was about to usher them back to bed, having dispelled any myths that might keep them awake even as the wind continued to make the trees groan around them. An especially bright shaft of lightning lit the room and caused Kelly to whoop enthusiastically. 

Robin, however, shuddered violently. “There! On the path!”

A figure advanced, shrouded in darkness, short fumbling steps. Startled into action Rebecca moved to the door and the girls screamed.

“It is only someone in need of help,” she told them firmly. Still, her hand shook on the bolts as she slid them across. 

The wind leapt at the chance to pass through the door and instantly everything was in disorder. Rebecca’s bare feet were wet as she stepped onto the porch, Robin and Kelly cowering behind her.

“Hello?” she called. “Do you need assistance?” Her voice became lost in the maelstrom but the figure advanced very definitely in her direction. “A lamp,” Rebecca gestured behind her. One of them placed it in her hand and scuttled away. She held up the light. “Hello?” 

At the foot of the steps onto the porch the lamp now illuminated the heavy dress, hooded cloak and upturned face of Isabelle Slotter.

Turning wordlessly to the side Rebecca let Mrs Slotter pass and followed her into the crib, double bolting the door behind them.

Robin and Kelly sat together in Rebecca’s bed as Isabelle shook the rain from her cloak. Some papers had disarranged themselves in the draught and a lamp blown out, which Rebecca remedied quickly, before moving toward her bag.

“Is there a difficulty at the house, Mrs Slotter?”

“I am no longer Mrs Slotter.”

Rebecca nodded. Isabelle was in no state of panic but this was not social call in the middle of a stormy night. “What can I do for you?”

“While your talents are undisputed I did not come for your assistance,” Isabelle said, and turned toward the bed. “I need the younger Miss Loving.”

Robin was already on her feet. “You feel it too?”

“The veil is thin tonight. My sleep is troubled. The dead whisper to me.”

Robin nodded solemnly and Rebecca felt it imperative to intervene. “The dead do not speak.”

“Maybe not to you. This is my arena, Mrs Blithely.”

“This is the occult, and it has no place in reality. I will not allow you to agitate the child further. Mrs Loving left the girls to my care.”

“As she has left them to mine before,” Isabelle countered. The building creaked under the force of the wind, causing Isabelle to glance around briefly. “I do not need your permission in any case.”

A distinct rapping on the door caused them all to startle. Isabelle took two sharp steps backwards. Determined to be the voice of reason Rebecca unbolted it once more. As she did so Fiona’s voice said, “Doc?”

And there on the porch stood Fiona and Mrs Briggs, a swaddled baby apiece.

“Come in, quickly,” Rebecca ushered them through. “What is it?”

Now arrived they looked bashfully at one another. Kelly motioned for the babies, who she and Robin took to coddle on the bed. 

Mrs Briggs unwrapped her scarves. “The strangest noise…” she said. “A scratching.”

“Or something like it,” Fiona said with jutting chin. 

“A branch,” Rebecca prompted, “or an animal. So you came outside?”

“I don’t know what it was,” Mrs Briggs said. “But we saw your lights. Thought maybe something the same was happening here. But it is Mrs Slotter.”

“I’m not - well, in any case, no, I was here to consult Mrs Blithely. In private.”

Fiona and her mother gave Rebecca a very particular look. “What is it?” she asked.

“Well, being as we are here…”

“They want to stay,” Isabelle said, “and lack the grace to ask it outright.”

Bemused, Rebecca said that of course, if they wished to. Isabelle then drew her away and spoke in low tones. “I will take the girl to the house. She has a true gift and there is unrest among the spirits.”

“You will not and there is not,” Rebecca replied in the same hush. 

“You think your modern science protects you,” Isabelle said. “But it does not answer all. This place… it defies rationality. You have not been here that long but you must recognise it. I know it.”

There was some kernel of intrigue that she stirred in Rebecca, probably with deliberate cunning, but it was still true. There was some indefinable element. But Rebecca would discover it and define it. Everything could be explained. Which is why she conceded to Isabelle’s next proposition. 

“Come with me to the house. You will see that I speak the truth. If you do not agree that will be the end of it.”

“I will not agree.”

Isabelle only looked at her.

“Very well. I will come, to dispel your fears.” She turned to the others. “Mrs Briggs, I must go to the mansion. Would you be so kind as to watch the girls?”

“Of course,” Mrs Briggs said. “In your nightdress?”

Rebecca considered that. “You are quite right.” So she changed quickly, trousers for the ease, a heavy coat and her physicians bag for good measure. Her pistol, also. 

The lamp proved entirely inadequate for the sheer volume of darkness pressing around them. Enough moonlight to be aware of the movement of the trees and the occasional flash of lightning to throw it all into sharp relief, a freeze frame as disorienting as it was helpful.

Isabelle’s body being so close meant Rebecca could feel her every qualm and shake. Rather than a distraction it was a comfort of sorts.

“Were you never afraid of a storm?” Isabelle asked. “Always so relentlessly literal?”

“My mother used to come and sit with me,” Rebecca remembered. “But I do not recall being afraid and needing her to.”

“Perhaps it was she who needed to,” Isabelle said, head low, concentrating on her steps.

Rebecca looked up, holding onto her hat. The branches twisted like bones above her. “Emily was a woman of great intellect. She would not have been afraid.” Would she have been afraid now? Was Rebecca? She willed it away.

“Mothers have more to fear,” Isabelle said, voice rising against the gusting of the wind in the copse they passed through. The lights of the mansion shone up ahead. 

Rebecca tried to catch her eye, to try to gauge the manner in which it was said, but could not. Isabelle’s sentiments on the matter were baffling. Still grieving over one child, heartlessly co-opting another, inducing Rebecca to help her avoid the birth of any further. 

What was clear was that Isabelle’s grief drove her further and further into this obsession with spirits. That Rebecca was now to disabuse her of. 

They entered the house through the kitchen. A shutter banged in the wind and the house creaked, looming over them as they sheltered inside.

Isabelle closed the door carefully. “Ignore Cornelius if he comes, he is drunk. Sleeping, hopefully.”

The house was mostly dark, a few lamps made the atmosphere almost worse than if there had been none.

“What is it you wish me to observe?”

Isabelle’s manner had changed now she was inside, she seemed to recede inwards and become more guarded. “Do you not feel it?”

“What is it you feel?” Rebecca prompted, trying to take a measure of this.

“An oppression. Like I am being watched on all sides.”

They were in the main parlour now. Rebecca already had unpleasant associations with all the horrors that had occurred here. But they came from within, not without. “Perhaps we ought not to have come back. You should take time elsewhere to clear your feelings.”

“I will not be chased out of this house by that man, not again.”

“By Cornelius Slotter?”

Isabelle turned, blazing in the lamplight. “By John.”

“Captain Slotter does not pursue you here. He cannot.”

“He is everywhere, can you not feel it?” There was a panic rising in Isabelle’s voice that Rebecca fought to stem.

“Memories, is all. Come to bed and I will give you a draught.”

Isabelle moved away. “No, I will not be drugged into submission.” Her shadow mounted the wall opposite as she moved from Rebecca’s lamp. Others clamoured behind it. A rising tide that threatened to engulf them. Fear could spread through Janestown as quick as cholera and almost as deadly. Without Kat the burden of quelling that fear was a responsibility that Rebecca felt fell to herself. And could to Isabelle too, if she were to be cured of this morbidity. 

The other shadows moved on the wall and across the room. Casting shapes that writhed and clawed at the house, at them. Only appeared to, Rebecca reassured herself. Together they looked to the windows.

“The trees moving,” Rebecca said. 

“You are blind.”

Rebecca went to the window, pulled back the lace. There was nothing, only the yard and the trees, beaten by rain. She had an idea.

“John!” Isabelle began to call, “I did all I could for you! Leave me be!”

Rushing to her side Rebecca hissed, “You will wake his father. Come, we will settle this matter once and for all.”

Out the front door they went, Isabelle lagging behind at first but picking up pace over the lawn. “This is why I need Robin Loving, to open a channel to the dead, to put them at ease.”

Rebecca said nothing, concentrated on her footing.

“You do not believe it, but you do believe a man can be brought back to life by electricity.”

“Only immediately after death,” Rebecca said, picking her way around the fence. That concept was of limited help in putting Isabelle at ease. “Here,” she called to Isabelle who lagged again. “See the proof of it.”

She held up the lantern and advanced against rain and wind to John Slotter’s grave. It was empty. 

It was impossible. A trick - a plan - revenge - his father - Isabelle herself… but Isabelle crept forward now, a hand on Rebecca’s arm.

“John?” She was shaking as she held to Rebecca, her fear and shock plain to see. 

Rebecca’s own hand shook on the handle of the lantern. She leant down to look at the scattered earth, congealing into mud. The broken wooden splinters of the coffin protruding. On her knees in the dirt she put a hand to the slimy wetness of a larger board. Isabelle hovered above her.

“It is not possible.”

“He has returned to take his vengeance.”

“It is not possible.”

“It is, it is done, it has happened.”

The rain ran down her neck, under her coat, and trickled down her back, prickling along her spine. That and the bone chilling creeping realisation of what she was facing. 

The impossible. 

The jagged lightning now illuminated the hastily dug, shallow grave. The boards, Rebecca realised, split outwards. 

She had carried his dead body from the clearing in the woods. She had examined the body, seen the grave. 

Rebecca needed time, needed space to consider this, weigh the options, but there was the more pressing issue of Captain Slotter’s current whereabouts, being as he clearly was not where he ought to be. 

So she rose, passed a pacing but resolute Isabelle, and checked the other graves. All intact. That it felt like relief marked how strange the situation was. 

“Where would he go?” She rounded on Isabelle. “Think, you know him best.”

“He has been torturing me.”

“He was not at the house. We checked there.”

Isabelle’s stoney face turned to the other graves. “Will they rise?”

“I would have said it were impossible but given the current circumstances…”

“John Slotter!” Isabelle bellowed. “Come out you weaselling coward. You were a coward of a man and worse as a ghost.”

Rebecca wheeled round, surprising herself with her willingness to believe he might emerge from the trees.

“He is not here,” Isabelle concluded. “He would not be able to resist a fight, dead or alive. He is not attempting to raise the others.”

“How -” Rebecca was perplexed, “how could that be? What do you mean by that?”

Isabelle drew close, in the flicker of the lantern between them Rebecca could see the shadows in Isabelle’s eyes, the sockets that waited within her skeleton to be revealed. As with all the men here rotting in their graves, a mess of flesh and sinew, root and worm. 

“He had a darkness,” Isabelle intoned. 

Rebecca nodded. “He referred to it several times. He thought himself evil. It is only a human judgement, a concept of our own making. It drove him to greater evils, believing he was doomed.”

“What else did he tell you?”

“That his heart must be black. When he took the heart from the bounty hunter. He believed the evil manifested itself there.” Rebecca gasped against the cold and the whipping of the wind. “After his death he told me to cut open his own body.”

“And did you?” Isabelle asked with force.

“No.” Slotter’s impulses had defined her too far. She resisted his final wish. 

“Maybe you should have,” Isabelle said. “You think it all in our heads but he did have a darkness on his very heart. The deals that man must have done with the devil. He was tormented to his death and now beyond it.”

“There is no such force.”

“Hold to that if you will but the grave is empty. His dark heart beats on. Only be grateful he has not yet raised an army to do his bidding.”

Rebecca groped around for a sufficient explanation. “There are errors sometimes with the pronouncement of death. A very weak pulse can appear extinguished.”

“And did you make such an error?”

She had not, she knew she had not. “We must return to the cribs,” Rebecca decided. Whatever this was it had moved beyond the realms of tricks of the light and childish fears. 

“Back to the house and barricade in until morning.” Isabelle had other ideas.

“I cannot leave them. If he should come looking for me…”

“I will not go with you looking for trouble.”

But Rebecca knew the truth of it. “Nor will you stay alone while he might hunt you.”

Isabelle took a moment’s hesitation before launching a new attack. She cocked her head in her convincing manner. “Come back with me to the house. You can continue your ministrations from last time you attended me there. Your explorations of electricity in the body.”

As much as Rebecca had thought of that very thing, and as appealing as a pragmatic, safe course of action was, she refused. “I go alone then,” and she began to walk away into the darkness. 

It was not very far until the lantern caught up with her and Isabelle drew alongside, one hand holding her skirts out of the mud, muttering something about pneumonia. But she was here, and it was a gesture Rebecca had hoped for but not expected.

Of course Isabelle had plenty at stake too. They had all suffered at the hands of John Slotter. But now Kat was gone, chasing down yet more threats, and Rebecca and Isabelle must do their best in her stead. 

The way back to the main Janestown street was another short but fraught journey. Through the swaying of the trees that lined the road there were the cries of animals in the pitch dark depths of the wood. What leaves they could see shone darkly in the rain as if with blood. 

There was an acoustic phenomenon whereby the wind took on the sound of wailing and Rebecca had observed it before but the particular sequence of events tonight made it especially disquieting. The occasional bark of fox or wolf would then echo as a human cry. It was the impulse to associate, to paint everything with human emotions. But she could not shake it. The wails and the screaming were manifestations of her own fears, she understood that. They were still fears. 

Then, “Rebecca!” splintering through her as the crack of a pistol. Only one voice, so sharp and exasperated. She shuddered to a halt. A branch breaking, a tree falling. It was not possible. “Rebecca!” 

“Do you hear?” she gasped to Isabelle. She wanted Isabelle to hear. If this was transpiring only in her own mind, auditory illusions, perhaps she was at best overwrought, at worse as mad as they said. 

She stepped forward. “Thomas?” The grave had not been disturbed. This was not the same, if it was real at all. 

“Spirit!” Isabelle’s voice broke through Rebecca’s confusion. She was at Rebecca’s side, holding her back, calling out into the darkness. “Spirit, are you sent by John Slotter?”

“Rebecca.”

Rebecca tried to speak but Isabelle squeezed her arm. She did not flinch from it. It felt like the only anchor to this world. 

Isabelle continued. “It is John Slotter that disturbs your rest. Do you know where he is?”

From the line of the trees a figure emerged as if drop by drop, coalescing from the darkness. 

“Purity,” he grinned, jaw hanging too loose. Faded around the edges in a manner that could not be entirely attributed to the dimness of the night. 

“John…” Isabelle warned.

But he looked only to Rebecca. A mist surrounded him, oozing up from the ground, out from his mouth.

“I should thank you,” his voice hissed, undertones of a rasping, echoing darkness. “I was weak -”

In no mood for discussion, Isabelle reached across Rebecca, whipped the pistol from its holster and shot John square in the chest. Rebecca recoiled in surprise, hands to her ears. John twisted but remained standing. The impact was ambiguously without blood or wound. 

Isabelle paced over to him and pressed the gun solidly against his forehead, cocking it again as she did so. Rebecca hurried over.

“I feel flesh here, John.”

He laughed. The noise chilled Rebecca’s bones. “Getting your hands dirty, Izzy?”

“I will suffer you no longer.”

“Suffer, suffer, suffer… How tedious life is. That I am now released from.”

“Your words are poison.” Isabelle’s shaking hand rattled the gun. Still she held it there and confronted her torment. “You are a malevolent spirit. In life as in death.”

“You always knew it too.”

“What happened to you?” Rebecca finally managed to ask. 

“Resurrection, doc! It’s a goddamn miracle, ‘cept neither of us believe in the things.”

Isabelle snorted. “Amount of blood seeped into this ground it’s no wonder. Or the devil himself wouldn’t take you.”

“That’s true as may be.”

“Why?” Rebecca wondered. “Your behaviour - you were begging to be killed.”

He grimaced. “Mortal weakness. Thought I wanted all ended. Change of scenery was all I needed. And I’ve you to thank.”

“Me?”

He reached to her, but Isabelle shoved him back. Angered, he raised his hand to the trees. Out of the shadows, or just out of the air, were summoned the men and women who had met their end in Janestown, or thereabouts. Mostly at Slotter’s hand, now at his command. 

“You don’t belong here.” He shook his head with regret. “A crying shame, to trap your talents in mortal flesh. The both of you.”

“Your schemes mean nothing.” Isabelle rebuffed him with a new, vigorous energy now that she was proven right, or now that she had a more corporeal man to oppose, rather than a spirit. 

“Those scruples, shame. So there’s your choice,” he announced. “Pledge to me your immortal souls, and so on and so forth - so much more amusing than all these mine contracts - or it all ends here.”

“You sick son of a -” Isabelle was ready to make use of the pistol again, as futile as that might be.

“No,” Rebecca said firmly. “I will not deal with you, John Slotter.”

“Consequences then, for you and yours.”

Hers. There was a hers, now. The girls Kat had entrusted to her charge. Mrs Briggs and Fiona, who had come to her in their distress. The townsfolk that relied on her even as they sometimes shunned her. And Isabelle, too, seeking counsel and support.

“This town is done with you.”

“This town is mine,” he menaced. “I built it. I will drown it in blood before it is all over.”

“I will not allow you to.”

He laughed and lifted up his arms, calling forward the spirits that surrounded them.  
Isabelle let loose another bullet but it passed through him without harm. 

The grey, ghostly army advanced. 

“He is not your master,” Isabelle said, low and urgent, finally in an audience with the spiritual world. “Be free of him in your death even if you could not in life.”

John seemed swelled with the powers of his command, summoning a strength from his army. The devastating use that could be put to was unthinkable. 

Unable to ignore what transpired in front of her own eyes, Rebecca adapted as the situation called for. “You could not be free,” she told the apparitions as they massed, indistinct and blurred, “but we will make sure your families, the people you love, the rest of this town is.”

There was a vision of a place Janestown could be and she committed herself to it in that moment.

The chills of spirits moved around Rebecca, now billowing right on top of her and Isabelle. Though indistinct and blurred there was a pain to each one that was transmitted to Rebecca. A physical pain masking a deeper one she could not comprehend, She held firm in her mind this vow to protect those who still lived.

Instead of overwhelming them the spirits swarmed a still-grinning John. He broke into angry cries as they massed around his arms, his legs, holding him back. Rebecca had steeled herself but an entirely different attack was underway. 

“I’ll not be condemned!” John shouted. “Not by you, not by anyone.”

“I’m not like you,” Rebecca repeated. 

John struggled in vain. Suspended in the air the apparitions he had created bent themselves around him, cloudy bodies looping and twisting. 

He was a seething pool, running with ghosts, when Rebecca reached through with her scalpel to wrest his heart from his cold chest. 

With howls equal parts indignation and fear John Slotter sank to the ground, still entwined, then into the ground, through the ground, gone. 

His unbeating heart, held in Rebecca’s shaking hand, turned to ash and blew away in the wind. 

…

Rebecca and Isabelle never spoke of the night’s events again. After refilling an empty grave in a race against the dawn light they went on with their lives. 

The earnest promise to the dead was held. More blood was spilled in Janestown and Rebecca did her best to staunch it. She taught, advised, tended to wounds both physical and otherwise. The town grew and it seemed to Rebecca that the balance of the place was changing. Close to the edge of wilderness but obeying the laws of science and rationality. 

There was Kat, fighting, striving always for a better world. Isabelle’s battles for power over Janestown’s commercial interests continued to be a good deal motivated by her own interests. But now also to others’ benefit, for the good of their settlement. And Rebecca, more than just a curiosity, now an essential organ in the workings of a place that was becoming more than a town, more than a collection of ghosts and suffering.


End file.
